Social Media

12 Fresh Web Tools for Getting the Most Out of Google Buzz

Jacob Gube is the Founder/Chief Editor of Six Revisions, a popular web development and design site and the Deputy Editor of Design Instruct, a web magazine for designers. He has over seven years of experience as professional web developer and has written a book on JavaScript. Connect with him via Twitter.

Buzz — Google's entry into the real-time social web — is becoming increasingly more popular. Because it was launched by an Internet giant and initially incorporated directly into Gmail by default (whether a good idea or not), the service was able to instantly compete with other, more well-established competitors like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace in the crowded social networking arena.

What's more, with Google's history of supporting web developers through free and public application programming interfaces (APIs), the opportunity to create web-based tools is abundant.

In fact, many of them are already beginning to crop up, even though the social network is still in its infancy (being less than two months old). Check out this list of web-based tools to help you get the most out of Google Buzz.

Connect with Other Social Networks

Anything that averts us from doing repetitive work is always a good thing. With Buzz Can Tweet, you have the capability to synchronize Buzz with your Twitter feed, automatically updating Twitter with the same message whenever you post a buzz.

In case you only want to send a Buzz-specific update, it offers an option for selective tweeting only buzzes with certain hashtags (like #twitter).

What's great about Buzz Can Tweet is that it makes messages longer than Twitter's 140-character limit easier to deal with, generating a short URL to your buzz update so that your Tweeps can read the message in its entirety.

Since Google Buzz allows the posting and attaching of multimedia items such as images and videos, another bonus to using Buzz Can Tweet is bypassing the need to use a Twitter image or video sharing service to post richer content.

HomePuzz is a web app that integrates Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook into one interface, giving you the opportunity to update all three services at the same time. It's a singular location for monitoring your social networks and seeing what your friends are saying, whether they use all or only one of the three services currently supported by this web tool.

For site owners and web developers, don't forget to check out the HomePuzz tools that give you options for incorporating HomePuzz into your website or web app.

Search

If you're familiar with Gmail's search syntax, you will no doubt appreciate the built-in search capabilities of Google Buzz (see a list of search methods on Google Help). Native search in Google Buzz blows Twitter's "advanced" search out of the water, giving you better and more accurate search results.

With that said, mucking around with search syntax can be cumbersome for some people. Enter Buzzzy, a web tool for searching items on Google Buzz profiles. Buzzzy has a near-replicate of Twitter's advanced search interface, undoubtedly designed for people accustomed to using Twitter's version.

In case you're into mashing up web services, Buzzzy offers a REST API to help you leverage its services in your own custom apps.

Statistics

The site buzzstats highlights how popular a Buzz user is by displaying statistics about their number of followers and the number of people they follow, as well as a chart of their follower growth history. It makes a bookmarkable URL for you to link to for times when you want people to know about your Buzz prowess.

In addition, the web tool automatically generates a small snippet of JavaScript that you can simply copy and paste into a website or blog for presenting a Buzz badge with your stats.

Bonus facts: buzzstats uses Google's Charting API to display statistics, and their website has a top 20 list of Buzz users, with Mashable claiming the highest spot.

Buzz-Charts is an online web tool for uncovering a plethora of stats about a Buzz profile, including the number of posts, where they send out their buzzes, their total number of replies, the total words they've used in the past 100 buzzes, and a bunch of other questionably useful statistics. See this live example for a working demonstration of how Buzz-Charts works.

Social Bookmarking

With TweetMeme's popularity skyrocketing to over 3.5 million visits per month, it's no surprise that enterprising web developers are seeking a chance to parallel the Twitter link aggregator's success over in the Google Buzz arena.

Buzrr is one such web tool — a social bookmarking site similar to TweetMeme created by Dennis Hettema. Hettema describes Buzrr as "a website that allows you to add a re-buzz button to your blog so your visitors can share your stories on their Google Buzz. Buzrr.com counts the re-buzz action and provides a ranking of the buzziest stories on Buzz." He adds that Buzrr is "just like TweetMeme and Digg but just with a different source.""

RebuzzThis is another social bookmark aggregator that uses Google Buzz as its source. Like Buzrr and TweetMeme, content shared through their RebuzzThis button is presented and indexed on their website.

The service is new, just like Google Buzz, but the site is taking shape nicely, and the creators have plans for improving their public API to give other website developers better opportunities to interface with their service.

Directories

If you're in search of interesting Buzzers to follow, check out Gone Buzz, an online directory of popular users.

A short bio, the user's location, the number of buzzes, and a rating is presented for each Buzz profile listed on the site. Additionally, if you log in — they use Google's authentication system so that you don't have to create an account on their website — you can rate each user profile on a scale of one to five stars.

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